Page Navigation

A privilege to serve

Associate professor Abi Gewirtz is improving outcomes for children
and families affected by trauma and extreme stress

Abi Gewirtz was working at a hotel in the Middle
East when the Gulf war broke out in 1991. As a young professional in
vocational counseling, her job included teaching the staff, tourists,
and journalists to put on gas masks in the event that chemical weapons
were deployed. When alarms sounded one morning at one o’clock,
everyone sprang into action.

The rockets carried no chemical weapons that night. But the very
real impact on the night-shift workers worried about their children at
home struck Gewirtz forever.

“They were beside themselves in agony,” she recalls quietly in
her University office in St. Paul. “That was what started me on
the path to study the impact of trauma on families.”

Gewirtz finished a Ph.D. at Columbia University in clinical
psychology. She liked working as a practitioner, but she found a lack of
evidence for the practices being used to help families affected by
trauma. That led to research on developing and testing new approaches.
Now on the faculty in both the Department of Family Social Science and
the Institute of Child Development, she is able to draw on both
disciplines and train a range of students.

The thread that runs through Gewirtz’s work is improving outcomes
for children affected by traumatic and other extreme stresses—from war
to homelessness—and finding strategies that work best.

“One of the primary correlates for resilience in kids is
effective parents and parenting,” she says. “The vast majority of
children in the world don’t have access to mental health resources. But
most children do have access to parents, so that’s our focus—putting
tools in the hands of parents.”

Gewirtz works at the vanguard of implementation research,
studying the way things work and getting effective methods into
widespread practice.

For example, Ambit Network is a federally-funded Center of the
National Child Traumatic Stress Network whose goal is to increase access
to quality care for children and families across Minnesota. Over the
past seven years, Ambit has trained 200 practitioners in 34 agencies to
deliver effective treatment for traumatized children. Based on its solid
results, Ambit was just refunded for 2012–16.

In Michigan, a team is testing an Oregon model for health care
delivery. The project explores people’s preferences for care
individually or in groups, at home or in a clinic.

“We actually have a lot of programs that we know work,” Gewirtz
says, “but they aren’t being used, so that’s the
challenge.”

A research project along the Israel-Gaza border is at an earlier
stage. There, a study is observing parent-child interactions in families
exposed to years of missile attacks, where they have 45 seconds’ notice
before a strike. While looking at the impact of such long-term exposure,
researchers also hope to see whether an effective parent-training model
developed in the United States has any relevance.

Space still available in Project ADAPT
Minnesota National Guard and Reserves parents with
children ages 5–12 who have been deployed to the current conflicts
(OIF, OEF, or OND)
are invited to become part of Project ADAPT (After Deployment, Adaptive
Parenting Tools). Other volunteers and forms of support are also
welcome. Read more and learn how you, or families you know, can
participate at www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/ADAPT or contact 612-624-8136 or
adapt@umn.edu. Watch the video.

In Minnesota, there is
Project ADAPT. Funded by the National
Institutes of Health, the project is recruiting military families,
especially those in the Minnesota National Guard and Reserves. The goal
is to ease the transition after deployment by developing and testing the
effectiveness of a parenting program to strengthen resilience in
children and families. Already 250 of the 400 families needed for the
study have enrolled and are participating. Each family’s home becomes a
virtual lab.

Down the hall from her office, a highly trained team of students
and post-docs spend hours decoding the data. Results from Project ADAPT
after six months are encouraging but the true test will come at the
one-year mark and beyond.

Gewirtz grew up hearing stories of her father’s evacuation from
war-torn London as a child. Today, she has four children of her own,
from grade school to college. As her slight figure moves from office to
lab to classroom, her drive to improve outcomes for all the world’s
children seems to infuse those around her as well.

“It is a complete privilege to work with these families who have
sacrificed so much for our country,” she says. “We have fantastic
community partners—and we don’t make change here in the
university without working with communities.”